Amy Shuffelton

The phrase ‘trigger warnings’ has been used in university discourse to refer to prefatory comments from instructors, warning students that texts and/or classroom discussions may be disturbing to some students. Ironically, trigger warnings are also offered to professors in classrooms where guns may be present. Both kinds of trigger have been viewed by some as at odds with free speech, and by others as necessary for genuinely free speech to prevail. In this chapter, we argue that the metaphor of ‘triggers’, like material guns, has no place in the classroom. Pedagogical prefaces are legitimate, we are, but calling them ‘trigger warnings’ is a mistake. This chapter draws on Richard Rorty, John Dewey, and George Lakoff to argue that because the language we use has material consequences, democracy demands that instructors adopt new metaphors to describe the kinds of arguments that make classrooms places in which education can happen.

Because the Harry Potter novels are set in Harry’s school, conversations with children about the books give insights into their thinking about teachers and school. Conversations with Serbian children about the books reveal a perspective on the ethical landscape of schools that is distinct from familiar scholarly perspectives on children’s ethics, particularly the ethics of fairness and caring. Serbian children judged teachers to be good if they were “strict but not too strict.” The “strict but not too strict” axis along which Serbian children aligned teachers is here explicated and compared to alternative ways of judging teachers good or bad. This article concludes that while the “strict but not too strict” standard has significant weaknesses, it deserves to be taken seriously as a conception of how imperfect human beings create relationships that promote human good, as well as a commentary on the role of the teacher.

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political.

This article explores a perplexing line from Rousseau's Emile: his suggestion that the ‘most important rule’ for the educator is ‘not to gain time but to lose it’. An analysis of what Rousseau meant by this line, the article argues, shows that Rousseau provides the philosophical groundwork for a radical critique of the contemporary cultural framework that supports homework, standardised testing, and the competitive extracurricular activities that consume children's time. He offers important insights to contemporary parents and educators wishing to reimagine an educational system that is currently fuelled more by familial and international amour propre than by children's interests and needs. Not the least of these is his recognition that to reimagine children's education would require a new configuration of the very terms of modern life. Problematically, however, Rousseau's alternative to mechanised clock-time depends on the labour of Sophie, whose time is also reconfigured. For the next generation of children to be educated according to natural time, Sophie's labour needs to be off the clock too, which is just as much a linchpin of her removal from the public sphere of citizenship and the paid workforce as it is of Emile's education for public life, or so the final section of this paper argues.

In this article, Amy Shuffelton addresses school shootings through an investigation of honor and masculinity. Drawing on recent scholarship on honor, including Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity and Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code, Shuffelton points out that honor has been misconstrued as exclusively a matter of hierarchical, competitive relationships. A second kind of honor, which exists within relationships of mutual respect between equals, she suggests, merits theorists' further consideration. In its hierarchical mode, honor is often a source of violent action, but honor in its egalitarian mode can play an important role in peacemaking. Shuffelton turns to Homer's Iliad and Adrienne Rich's “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” to explore honor's potential. Linking both kinds of honor to masculinity and the issue of gun violence, this article contends that to address gun violence in and outside of schools, masculine honor needs to be “reissued” as a matter of egalitarian relationships based on honest communication